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Ann. Rev. Social. 1987. 13:1-28
Copyright © 1987 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved
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Robert K. Merton
Universi�y Professor Emeritus, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027,
and Russell Sage Foundation, 112 East 64 Street, New York, New York 10021
Abstract
This occasionally biographical paper deals with three cognitive and social
patterns in the practice of science (not 'the scientific method'). The first,
"establishing the phenomenon, " involves the doctrine (universally accepted in
the abstract) that phenomena should of course be shown to exist or to occur
before one explains why they exist or how they come to be; sources of
departure in practice from this seemingly self-evident principle are examined.
One parochial case of such a departure is considered in detail. The second
pattern is the particular form of ignorance described as "specified ignorance":
the express recognition of what is not yet known but needs to be known in
order to lay the foundation for still more knowledge. The substantial role of
this practice in the sciences is identified and the case of successive specifica
tion of ignorance in the evolving sociological theory of deviant behavior by
four thought-collectives is sketched out. Reference is made to the virtual
institutionalization of specified ignorance in some sciences and the question is
raised whether scientific disciplines differ in the extent of routinely specifying
ignorance and how this affects the growth of knowledge. The two patterns of
scientific practice are linked to a third: the use of "strategic research materials
(SRMs)" i .e. strategic research sites, objects, or events that exhibit the
phenomena to be explained or interpreted to such advantage and in such
accessible fonn that they enable the fruitful investigation of previously stub-
born problems and the discovery of new problems for further inquiry. The
development of biology is taken as a self-exemplifying case since it provides
innumerable SRMs for the sociological study of the selection and con
sequences of SRMs in science. The differing role of SRMs in the natural
sciences and in the Geisteswissenschaften is identified and several cases of
strategic research sites and events in sociology, explored.
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INTRODUCTION
In the abstract, it need hardly be said that before one proceeds to explain or to
interpret a phenomenon, it is advisable to establish that the phenomenon
actually exists, that it is enough of a regularity to require and to allow
explanation. Yet, sometimes in science as often in everyday life, explanations
are provided of matters that are not and never were. We need not reach back
only to ancient days for such episodes as the younger Seneca explaining why
some waters are so dense that no object, however heavy, will sink in them or
explaining why lightning freezes wine. Our own century provides ample
instances. There is Rene Blondlot's report of having discovered a "new
species of invisible radiation," dubbed N rays. These were later "observed"
by a dozen or so other investigators in France, but there were no comparable
replications in England, Germany, or the United States. Intensive further
FROM A SOCIOLOGIST'S NOTEBOOKS 3
inquiry, by French scientists as well as others, established the fact that the
phenomenon was not one of N rays but rather of wishful perception and
self-fulfilling prophecy. After that, N rays were no longer observed (Rostand
1960:12-29, Price 1961:85-90). Or again, there is Boris Deryagin's "discov
ery" of polywater in the 1960s, later found to be wholly artifactual (Franks
1981). Such episodes return us to Claude Bernard's observation that "if the
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the empirical data run contrary to widespread beliefs. Thus, it would seem
premature to ask why "urbanization is accompanied by destruction of the
social and moral order" inasmuch as evidence accumulates (Fischer 1977) to
suggest that the connection is rather more an assumption than a repeatedly
demonstrated fact.
I n sociology as in other disciplines [see Leontief (1971) on economics],
efforts to establish recurring social patterns are often described-sometimes
of course with justice-as simply "fact-finding" or "fact-mongering" by those
preferring swift explanation. Yet years ago, at the turn of the century, the
exemplary scientist-philosopher C. S. Peirce was reminding us of the analytic
function of fact-finding in what he described as the salient process of abduc
tion (in turn related to processes of deduction and induc tion):
Accepting the conclusion that an explanation is needed when facts contrary to what we
should expect emerge, it follows that the explanation must be such a proposition as would
lead to prediction of the observed facts, either as necessary consequences or at least as very
probable under the circumstances. A hypothesis, then, has to be adopted, which is likely in
itself, and renders the facts likely. This step of adopting a hypothesis as being suggested by
the facts, is what I call abduction (Peirce 1958:VII 121-22; emphasis supplied).
The ex post facto phase of an empirical inquiry---or as some prefer; the post
factum or post festem phase-has us introduce a hypothesis adopted, of
course, only "on probation," while the ex ante phase draws out necessary and
probable experiential consequences which can be put to falsifying or confirm
ing test. Practiced investigators take it as a matter of course that, along with
the free play of imagination drawing upon explicit and tacit knowledge,
factual evidence often brings fruitful ideas to mind. To recognize this is not to
engage in enumerative induction, pure and excessively simple. (I tried to
elucidate these notions in "The bearing of empirical research upon the de
velopment of social theory," Merton 1948) .
As I have noted, the basic role of empirical research designed to "establish
the phenomenon" is at times downgraded as "mere empiricism. " Yet we know
that "pseudo-facts have a way of inducing pseudo-problems, which cannot be
4 MERTON
solved because matters are not as they purport to be" (Merton 1959:xv).
Social scientists of diverse theoretical and value orientations have found it
useful to address this matter of pseudo-facts; as examples, see Zeitlin
(1974:1074-75) on the separation of ownership and control in large corpora
tions, Gutman (1976:462-63) on the black family, and Sowell (1981 :59) on
ethnic education. To repeat myself: "only when tedious recitations of un
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related fact [and fact-claimsl are substituted for fact-related ideas does inquiry
decline into 'mere fact-finding.' "Otherwise, of course, it is a crucial element
in scientific inquiry.
As Neil Smelser reminded me upon reading this piece, establishing the
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Social Structure (for which I had happily written the foreword when it was
first published in 1953). The German publishers went on to specify the
pseudo-fact by declaring that Mills had "lost his professorship during the
McCarthy period" ("verlor wahrend der McCarthy-Zeit seinen Lehrstuhl").
Not long afterward, an article in the Yugoslavianjoumal Praxis, also ignoring
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1 Aftcr our talk, Alvin Gouldncr took quick action to erase that pseudo-fact, noting that
"shortly after the publication of the Crisis I discovered (from Robert Merton) that my assertion
that C. Wright Mills had never been made a Professor at Columbia was in error. Having
discovered this, I immediately had this statement removed from the Avon paperback edition of
the Crisis, which was then in production" (Gouldner 1973:130-131). The import of the episode
apparently stayed with Alvin, for years later, and in quite a different context, he took care to
observe: "Whether anything might be or even should have been is one thing; whether it was in
fact, is quite another" (Gouldner 1980:281).
6 MERTON
place). Consider only this reminder as set forth by the jurist and orientalist,
John Selden, in his widely-read Table Talk ([1689] 1 890: 1 39): "The Reason of
a Thing is not to be enquired after, till you are sure the Thing itself be so. We
commonly are at What's the Reason of it? before we are sure of the Thing."
So, too, Bernard Fontenelle, the polymath destined to become a centenarian
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and the almost but not quite literally secretaire perpetuel of the French
Academy of Sciences-he served for only 42 years-was observing in his
Histoire des oracles ([1686]1 908:33): "I am convinced that our ignorance
consists not so much in failing to explain what is as in explaining what is not.
In other words, we not only lack principles that lead to the true but hold others
that readily lead to the false." What Fontenelle did not take occasion to
observe, however, is that a certain kind of ignorance advances scientific
knowledge.
SPECIFIED IGNORANCE
It was Francis Bacon who made "the advancement of learning" a watchword
in the culture of science emerging in the seventeenth century. From then till
now, efforts to understand how science develops have largely centered on the
modes of replacing ignorance by knowledge, with little attention to the
formation of a useful kind of ignorance, as distinct from the manifestly
2That some (unknown number of) academic careers have been curbed or halted by political or
ideological commitments is, of course, a matter of historical record (Lazarsfeld & Thielens 1958,
Schrecker 1986). But it was Bemhard J. Stem, not Mills, who, an announced Marxist and
cofounder of the Marxist joumal Science and Society, never advanced beyond a lectureship in the
Columbia Department of Sociology, despite departmental recommendations for promotion. Just
as again, it was Bemhard J. Stem, not C. Wright Mills, who was attacked by Joe McCarthy as an
alleged Communist only to have the University respond by continuing Stem in his marginal post
as Lecturer. During the McCarthy period, actual events often transcended social categories such
as Establishment and self-declared anti-Establishment figures. Thus, when McCarthy's associate,
the then vice-presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, was charged by some Columbia professors
with having "violated an elementary rule of public morality" by the way he had accumulated
campaign funds, he responded by ransacking the files of the House Committee on UnAmerican
Activities and then catapulting nine of those professors onto banner headlines in the New York
Daily News and the Chicago Tribune as alleged subversives; the infamous nine included the
literary critic Mark van Doren, the philosopher Irwin Edman, the historian Henry Steele
Commager, and the sociologists, Robert M. MacIver, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and Robert K.
Merton-but not, as he himself ironically noted, C. Wright Mills.
FROM A SOCIOLOGIST'S NOTEBOOKS 7
These retrospective notes focus on the dynamic cognitive role played by the
particular form of ignorance I describe as "specified ignorance": "the express
recognition of what is not yet known but needs to be known in order to lay
the foundation for still more knowledge" (Merton 1971:191). "As the his
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tory of thought, both great and small, attests, specified ignorance is often
a first step toward supplanting that ignorance with knowledge" (Mer
ton 1957:417).
The concept of specified ignorance hints at various other kinds and shades
of acknowledged ignorance in science. The familiar kind of a general, rote,
and vague admission of ultimate ignorance serves little direct cognitive
purpose though it may have symbolic significance in reminding us of our
limitations. This kind, however, does not issue in definite questions. And
vague questions evoke dusty answers. After all, it takes no great courage, or
skill, in the domain of science to acknowledge a general want of knowledge.
It is not merely that Socrates set an ancient pattern of announcing one's
ignorance. Beyond that, the values of modern science have long put a
premium on the public admission of one's limitations or the expression of
humility in the face of the vast unknown. Scientists of epic stature have
variously insisted on how little they have come to know and to understand in
the course of their lives. We remember Galileo teaching himself and his
pupils to reiterate: "I do not know. " And then, inevitably, one recalls the
"memorable sentiment" reportedly uttered by Newton "a short time before his
death":
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a
boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother
pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered
before me (Brewster 1855: II, 407).
Or again, Laplace-the French Newton-is said to have put much the same
sentiment in a typically Gallic epigram: "What we know is not much; what we
do not know is immense" (Bell 1937:172). What the mathematician Bell
(1931:204) describes elsewhere as "a common and engaging trait of the truly
eminent scientist [found] in his frequent confession of how little he knows"
can be identified sociologically as the living up to a normative expectation of
ultimate humility in a community of sometimes egocentric scientists. It is not
8 MERTON
this or that piece of ignorance derived from having acquired the added degree
of knowledge that made it possible to identify definite portions of the still
unknown. In workaday science, it is not enough to confess one's ignorance;
the point is to specify it. That, of course, amounts to instituting, or finding, a
new, worthy, and soluble scientific problem.
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reminded us: "A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing-a focus upon
object A involves a neglect of object B" (Burke 1 935:70). In this case,
Sutherland's focus on the acquisition of these deviant patterns left largely
untouched specifiable ignorance about the ways in which the patterns
emerged in the first place.
Upon identifying that pocket of theoretical neglect, Merton ( 1938a) pro
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theories were consolidated and extended by Cohen ( 1 955) who proposed that
delinquency subcultures arise as adaptations to this disjunction between cul
turally induced goals and the legitimate opportunity-structure and by Cloward
& Ohlin ( 1 960) who proposed that the social structure also provides differen
tial access to illegitimate opportunities. Since that composite of theories
centered on socially structured sources of deviant behavior, it had next to
nothing to say about how these patterns of misbehavior are transmitted or
about how these initial departures from the social rules sometimes crystallize
into deviant careers, yet another sphere of specifiable ignorance.
That part of the evolving problematics was taken up in labeling (or societal
reaction) theory as initiated by Lemert ( 1 95 1 ) and Becker ([ 1 963] 1 973) and
advanced by Erikson (1964), Cicourel ( 1 968), and Kitsuse (1964). It centered
on the processes through which some people are assigned a social identity by
being labeled as "delinquents," "criminals," "psychotics," and the like and
how, by responding to such stigmatization, they enter upon careers as de
viants. In Becker's words: "Treating a person as though he were generally
rather than specifically deviant produces a self-fulfilling prophecy. It sets in
motion several mechanisms which conspire to shape the person in the image
people have of him" (Becker [1963] 1973:34). With this problem as its focus,
labeling theory has little to say about the sources of primary deviance or the
making of societal rules defining deviance. As Lemert ( 1 973:462) specified
this ignorance: "When attention is turned to the rise and fall of moral ideas
and the transformation of definitions of deviance, labeling theory and
ethnomethodology do little to enlighten the process."
It is precisely this problem that the conflict theory of deviance took as
central. Its main thrust, as variously set forth by Turk ( 1969) and Quinney
( 1 970), for example, holds that a more or less homogeneous power elite
incorporates its interests in the making and imposing of legal rules. It thus
addresses questions neglected by the earlier theories: How do legal rules get
formulated, how does this process affect their substance, and how are they
differentially administered?
The case of deviance theory indicates how a dimly felt sense of sociological
10 MERTON
ignorance was successively specified for one class of social phenomena. But
it is not yet known whether scientific disciplines differ in the practice of
specifying ignorance-in the extent to which their practitioners state what it is
about an established phenomenon that is not yet known and why it matters for
generic knowledge that it become known. 3 Such specified ignorance is at a far
remove from that familiar rote sentence which concludes not a few scientific
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papers to the effect that "more research is needed." Serendipity aside, ques
tions not asked are questions seldom answered. The specification of ignorance
amounts to problem-finding as a prelude to problem-solving.
It is being proposed that the socially defined role of the scientist calls for
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3Mathematics, of course, has a long tradition of publishing fundamental problems (long ago,
in the form of challenges). Upon reading this p ortion of the chapter, my colleagues, Joshua
Lederberg and Eugene Garfield, informed me of their episodic interest in institutionalizing what
amounts to the specification of ignorance. For one expression of that interest in print, see
Garfield's (1974) "The Unanswered Questions of Science." Lederberg has made me the benefici
ary of his 1974 permuterm bibliography entitled "Unsolved Problems" in the various sciences and
has referred me to a specimen volume entitled 100 Problems in Environmental Health (McKee et
al 1961). My attention was also redirected to that superb and lively anthology I had misplaced,
The Scientist Speculates: An Anthology of Partly Baked Ideas (Good et aI 1962), which is
designed "to raise more questions than it answers." Of particular interest is the piece in the
anthology happily entitled "Ignoratica" by one Felix Serratosa who ascribes the essential idea of a
"science of unknowns" to the explosive imagination of that prolific and often paradoxical
Florentine critic, novelist, poet, andjoumalist Giovanni Papini. However that may all be, it can
be said in self-exemplifying ,style: That the specification of ignorance is indispensable to the
advancement of knowledge, I do not doubt; whether disciplines do differ notably in the practice
of such specification, I do not know. Since the phenomenon is not yet established, I do not
undertake to explain such possible variation. But one can still speculate . , .
FROM A SOCIOLOGIST'S NOTEBOOKS 11
the discovery of new problems for further inquiry (Merton [ 1 963a] 1 973:37 1 -
82). SRMs take differing forms i n the various disciplines: among them, the
(location) strategic research site (SRS) and the (temporal) strategic research
event (SRE). Differing in operative detail, these forms have much the same
functions. Just as the invention of new technologies for scientific investiga
tion can facilitate the advance of scientific knowledge, so with the finding or
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creating of SRMs.
The concept of SRM provides a guide to the understanding of certain
turning points in the sciences. Problems that have long remained intransigent
become amenable as investigators identify new kinds of empirical materials
that effectively exhibit the structure and workings of the phenomena to be
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examination and to deposit that strategic stomach, hole and all, in an appro
priate museum. To round out the episode, I should report that intent was not
translated into event: Osler refrained, upon receiving a warning telegram from
St. Martin's French-Canadian community that read "Don't come for autopsy;
will be killed" (Osler 1908:159-88, Cushing 1925: I, 177-79).
The early geneticists and especially the more recent molecular biologists hit
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Quite evidently, then, the biological sciences have long involved the search
for SRMs and their sustained intensive investigation. That experimental
tradition is at a considerable remove from the largely nonexperimental work
in the social and behavioral sciences. Nevertheless, in those disciplines also
we observe a hunt for empirical materials, research sites, and events that are
judged strategic for investigating a generic scientific problem and for identify
ing new problems. Still, there is at times a profound difference in the
orientations of biological scientists and social scientists toward the phe
nomena they establish and investigate. To a degree, that difference relates to
the well-known distinction proposed by the philosopher Wilhelm Windelband
( 1 884) and substantially developed by his student, Heinrich Rickert ([1 902]
192 1 ). That is the distinction between the Naturwissenschaften (readily trans
lated as "the natural sciences") and the Geisteswissenschaften (not as readily
and variously translated as "the human sciences," "the social sciences," or
perhaps as "the sociocultural sciences"). Associated as he was with Rickert in
several respects, Max Weber ( 1 922) nevertheless transcended the Windel
band-Rickert distinction between the natural sciences as adopting methods
exclusively designed for nomothetic or generalizing objectives and the social
sciences as exclusively adopting quite different methods for understanding the
idiographic or individual character of a sociocultural reality.
For in place of this drastic, all-or-none choice between the two method
ological orientations, one may choose the composite of intrinsic interest in
understanding the particular "historical individuals"-for example, the
capitalistic society of nineteenth-century England or the French Revolution
or, for that matter, the Great Depression of the 1 930s--and of an instrumental
14 MERTON
fIrst hand. Or again, Thomas & Znaniecki (1918-1920) examine the historical
case of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America both for its distinctive
("unique") characteristics and for its presumably generic patterns of social and
personality change.
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In short, it is being proposed that the history of sociological inquiry has its
own complement of researches which relate variously to the use of strategic
research sites and events: In one type, the empirical case is selected wholly
because of intrinsic interest in it as a historical individual on grounds of its
relevance to values (Wertbeziehung), which Rickert held to be distinctive of
the Geisteswissenschaften. In another type, the empirical case is regarded
wholly as an SRS or SRE leading to provisional generalizations. And in what
I take to be the most felicitous mode, the concrete materials hold both intrinsic
interest as involving human values and instrumental interest as an SRS or SRE
that may advance our general sociological knowledge.
Karl Marx provides us with a prime early instance of this last type. In the
preface to the fIrst German edition of Capital, he begins with a not uninterest
ing allusion to the logic of inquiry adopted by physicists and then goes on to
the rationale for adopting a particular site for his own inquiry:
The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they occur in their most typical
form and most free from disturbing influence or, wherever possible, he makes experiments
under conditions that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality. In this
work I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production
and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is
England. That is the reason why England is used as the chief illustration in the development
of my theoretical ideas (Marx [1867] 1906:12-13).
analyses of these historical materials which hold great intrinsic interest for
many of us are powerfully joined with their instrumental use as SRSs leading
to nomothetic hypotheses about such abstract sociological problems as the
relations between institutionalized ideas and social organization as well as the
modes and dynamics of structural interdependence of seemingly unconnected
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research sites and events. But of all these, nothing more can be said here.
Instead, I obey the injunction of the Editors of Annual Review to make this
prefatory piece as personal as I can bring myself to do and close out these
capsule notes on the concept of SRM in two steps. First, I want to examine a
turning point in the history of psychoanalysis that I have often singled out as a
classic instance of an acute theoretical sensibility-to wit, Freud himself
transmuting seemingly trivial phenomena into strategic research material
(however different present-day appraisals of that material may be). This
invites attention to the apparently paradoxical theme of the occasional, per
haps frequent, importance in science and scholarship of what appear to be
humanly insignificant phenomena. From that historic episode I move to three
distinctly minor efforts on my own part to set forth an explicit rationale for
adopting various kinds of sociological SRMs.
. . . in noting that the unexpected fact must be 'strategic,' i.e. that it must permit
implications which bear upon generalized theory, we are, of course, referring rather to
what the observer brings to the datum than to the datum itself. For it obviously requires a
theoretically sensitive observer to detect the universal in the particular. After all, men had
for centuries noticed such 'trivial' occurrences as slips of the tongue, slips of the pen,
typographical errors, and lapses of memory, but it required the theoretic sensitivity of a
Freud to see these as strategic data through which he could extend his theory of repression
and symptomatic acts (Merton 1948:507).
It is to these phenomena, then, that I now propose to draw your attention. But you will
protest with some annoyance: 'There are so many vast problems in the [wide] universe, as
well as within the narrower confines of our minds, . . . that it does really seem gratuitous to
waste labour and interest on such trivialities. . . . '
I should reply: Patience , Ladies and Gentlemen ! I think your criticism has gone astray.
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It is true that psycho-analysis cannot boast that it has never concerned itself with trivialities.
On the contrary, the material for its observations is usually provided by the inconsiderable
events which have been put aside by the other sciences as being too unimportant-the
dregs, one might say, of the world of phenomena. But are you not making a confusion in
your criticism between the vastness of the problems and the consciousness of what points to
them? Are there not very important things which can only reveal themselves, under certain
conditions and at certain times, by quite feeble indications? (Freud [1916] 1961:26-27).
4As others have held and as Bettelheim has emphatically observed, this awkward term is a
misleading translation of a central concept. Unable to improve upon Bettelheim's analysis, I do
service by transmitting it here: "Freud coined Fehlleistung to signify a phenomenon that he had
recognized--one that is common to the various ways in which our unconscious manages to
prevail over our conscious intentions in everyday occurrences. The term combines two common,
strangely opposite nouns, with which everybody has immediate and significant association.
Leistung has the basic meaning of accomplishment, achievement, performance, which is quali
fied by the Fehl to indicate an achievement that somehow failed-was off the mark, in error.
What happens in Fehlleistung is simultaneously-albeit on different levels of consciousness-a
real achievement and a howling mistake . Normally. when we think of a mistake we feel that
something has gone wrong, and when we refer to an accomplishment we approve of it. In
Fehlleistung, the two responses become somehow merged: we both approve and disapprove,
admire and disdain". (Bettelheim 1983:86-87).
18 MERTON
This illustration has been chosen because, among other reasons, it is a simple case that is
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likely to seem trivial. Note well, however, that nothing is trivial , but thinking (or feeling)
makes it so, and that we must ever guard against coloring facts with our prejudices. There
was a time not so very long ago when electro-magnetic interactions, mosquitoes, and
microorganisms seemed trivial. It is when we study the social sciences that the risk of
mixing our prejudices and passions with the facts, and thus spoiling our analysis, is most
likely to prevail (Henderson [1941] 1970: 19; see also Bernard Barber's comment introduc
ing this passage in Henderson's oral publication which Barber arranged to have put into
print) .
A scientifically unimportant discovery is one which, however true and however interesting
for other reasons, has no consequences for a system of theory with which scientists in that
field are concerned. Conversely, even the most trivial observation from any other point of
view-a very small deviation of the observed from the calculated position of a star, for
instance-may be not only important but of revolutionary importance, if its logical
consequences for the structure of theory are far-reaching (Parsons 1937:7-8).
event were these: First, it was a "real-life" situation , not an isolllted, recogniz
ably contrived situation of the kind that limits the transferability of laboratory
findings in social psychology to the world outside . Second, the bond purchas
es provided a behavioral index of effective persuasion which, however crude ,
was far bett�than the hypothetical pencil-and-paper responses common in
the laboratory research of the time. Third, there was reason to suppose that the
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[TheJ social scientist investigating mass opinion may adopt the standpoint of the
positivist, proclaim the ethical neutrality of science, insist upon his exclusive concern with
the advancement of knowledge, explain that science deals only with the discovery of
uniformities and not with ends and assert that in his role as a detached and dispassionate
scientist, he has no traffic with values. He may, in short, affirm an occupational philosophy
which appears to absolve him of any responsib ility for the use to which his discoveries in
methods of mass persuasion may be put. With its specious and delusory distinction [in this
contextJ between 'ends' and ' means' and its insistence that the intrusion of social values
into the work of scientists makes for special pleading, this philosophy fails to note that the
investigator's social values do influence his choice and definition of problems. The
investigator may naively suppose that he is engaged in the value-free activity of research,
whereas in fact he may simply have so defined his research problems that the results will be
of use to one group in the society, and not to others . His very choice and definition of a
problem reflects his tacit values (Merton et al 1946:187-88).
prized values.
B ack in the 1 930s, when the sociology of science was far from having been
legitimated as a scholarly field of inquiry, even the historians of science most
critical of a study of the social and cultural contexts of the efflorescence of
science in seventeenth-century England (Merton [ 1 938] 1 970) did not ques
tion its scholarly relevance. Some were even prepared to accept, on proba
tion, its substantive hypotheses of linkages between Puritanism and the
emergence of the new science as well as its hypotheses of the partial shaping
of foci of scientific interest by economic and technological developments of
the time . Some went on to take friendly note of the use in that study of the
then newly developed procedures of prosopography (analysis of collective
biography) (Stone 1971 :50-5 1 , Shapin & Thackray 1 974:22) and the quan
titative analysis of changing scientific foci through content-analysis of the
new journal of the new science, Philosophical Transactions. Wertbeziehung
gave immediate scholarly warrant to the "subjects" under study.
Not so, however, with another study of mine two decades later. In it I had
elected to focus on a recurrent phenomenon in science over the centuries,
though one which had been ignored for systematic study: priority-conflicts
among scientists, including the greatest among them, who wanted to reap the
glory of having been first to make a particular scientific discovery or scholarly
contribution. This was paradoxically coupled with strong denials, by them
selves and by disciples, of their ever having had such an "unworthy and
puerile" motive for doing science. 5 The initial and subsequent response to that
study is captured in a remarkably candid account by the historian of science
and editor-in-chief of the 1 6-volume Dictionary of Scientific Biography,
5Those self-deprecatory words are Freud's. Still, his biographer and disciple, Ernest Jones
(1957, III: 105) writes that "Freud was never interested in questions of priority which he found
merely boring," thus providing another case of fashioning a biographical pseudo-fact although
abundant and accessible evidence testifies otherwise. Elinor Barber and I have identified some
150 occasions on which Freud exhibited an interest in priority. With typical self-awareness, he
reports having even dreamt about priority and the credit nonnativcly due scientists for their
contributions (Merton [1963] 1973:385-91).
22 MERTON
Some years ago, probably in early 1958 , Merton sent me an offprint of . . . his presidential
address to the American Sociological Association on "Priorities in Scientific Discovery"
[( 1 957) 1 973:286-324]. It starts by noting (pp. 286-87) "the great frequency with which
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the history of science is punctuated by disputes, often by sordid disputes, over priority of
discovery." As I read on, dismay overtook amusement at the parade of eminent scientists
arguing and frequently quarreling with each other, not over what the truth was, but over
who had it flTst, Newton or Leibniz, Newton or Hooke, Cavendish or Watt or Lavoisier,
Adams or LeVerrier, Jenner or Pearson or Rabaut, Freud or Janet. Sometimes the great
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men themselves abstained from contending in the lists of professional recognition for title
to their intellectual property only to have their claims championed by disciples or compa
triots. All too clearly the particular instances that Merton adduced in a number of variations
on the theme of intellectual possessivcness could have been multiplied almost indefinitely.
In a note of acknowledgment to Merton, I wrote that, although it seemed surprising
that the phenomenon was so nearly universal an accompaniment to scientific discovery , I
did wonder whether the matter wasn't a bit trivial. I don't believe I also said "unworthy"
but recollect that such a dark thought was in my mind (Gillispie 1974:656).
community to be one wherein the dynamics derive from the competition for honor even as
the dynamics of the classical economic community do from the competition for profit, and
neither of those statements is in any way incompatible with agreeing that the competitors
characteristically like their work and choose it for that reason (Gillispie 1 974:656).
of intense competition and marginal if not sharp practices in the author' s quest
for a Nobel variously exemplified what was set down in the sociological
analysis of intellectual property and the race for priority in science which had
appeared a decade before.
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One further observation will round out this impromptu case study of a
strategic research site in the sociology of science. Were Charles Gillispie
reflecting on his shifting response to that early study of priority-conflicts
today, after the quite recent spate of concern over the occurrence of fraud in
science, he might have elucidated his account further. He might have gone on
to observe that the study had proposed the strongly stated hypothesis that
contradictions between the reward-system and the normative system of sci
ence made for such pathologies as the occasional felonies of plagiarism and
the cooking of fraudulent data, the presumably more frequent misdemeanors
of hoarding one ' s own data while making free use of others' data, and the
breaching of the mores of science by failing to acknowledge the contributions
of predecessors, the collective giant on whose shoulders one stood to see a bit
or, rarely, a great deal farther. Gillispie might have noted that this 1957 paper
was the first to set out a sociological analysis of fraud in science, a good many
years before currently publicized cases of such scientific felonies had forced
widespread attention, both scholarly and popular, to the phenomenon
(Zuckerman 1977, Broad & Wade 1982). Now for me to visit this observation
on Charles Gillispie might be taken as a self-exemplifying claim to priority (as
no doubt it is). But the chief point is less a matter of priority than of attending
to the sources of that early sociologically grounded focus on the phenomenon
of fraud in science. That focus derived theoretically from anomie-and
opportunity-structure theory and empirically from the selection of priority
conflicts as a strategic research site. And this, in tum, suggests that once
problems are theoretically identified, materials that were previously periph
eral or of no interest at all become reassessed as, in effect, strategic research
materials.
CODA
It is now plain why the preceding pages are described as fragments. Obvious
ly, much more is needed to establish these three patterns of scientific practice
24 MERTON
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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I thank colleagues near and far for their thoughtful reading of early and late
drafts of this paper; in the first instance, Joshua Lederberg, Robert C . Merton,
and Harriet Zuckerman, and then, Orville G. Brim, Jr. , Jonathan R. Cole, Cyn
thia F. Epstein, Jonathan Rieder, David L. Sills, D. K. Simonton, Neil J. Smel
by Lund University Libraries, Head Office on 03/24/14. For personal use only.
ser, and Stephen M . Stigler. I acknowledge aid of another kind from the John
D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation .
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